THE TRACE
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There is always a precise moment when something shifts, rarely with a bang, almost never with shouts, but with an imperceptible shift: a sentence voted on behind closed doors, an amendment buried in a technical text, a word added to a code already too thick to be read by those it actually concerns. This moment is not spectacular. It is administrative. And yet, it is decisive.
Requiring the declaration of a self-hosted crypto wallet is not just another tax measure. It's not simply another line item on an annual tax return. It's not an accounting adjustment. It's a silent rupture between the individual and what they own, an attempt to bring private ownership back into the public eye, a deliberate attempt to leave a trace where, until now, there has only been willful silence.
The official justification is well-known. It's always the same: the fight against fraud, the need for transparency, and tax fairness. These are clean, abstract words, disconnected from any lived experience. Words that float above reality without ever confronting it. Because in reality, owning a self-hosted portfolio is neither a speculative nor a criminal act. It is, more often than not, a slow, almost intimate process that begins with distrust, continues with curiosity, and ends with taking responsibility.
Those who choose self-hosting don't do so to hide. They do it because they understand that delegating the custody of their assets means accepting structural dependence, permanent vulnerability, exposure to changing rules, fallible intermediaries, and systems that promise security while making it conditional on obedience. They do it because they understand that sovereignty is not a slogan, but a burden, and that this burden begins with managing one's own keys.
This action, however, is now viewed with suspicion. Not because it causes harm. Not because it generates identifiable fraud. But because it goes undetected. Because it leaves no automatic trace. Because it doesn't spontaneously register itself in administrative databases. In the mindset of the modern state, what isn't immediately visible becomes a blind spot to be corrected. And correcting, in this context, means making declarations mandatory.
What exactly should one declare? A value. An estimate. A figure based on a shifting, volatile reality, dependent on a market that no one controls and that even the tax authorities only partially understand. Declare without a taxable event. Declare without a transfer of ownership. Declare without income. Declare simply because one owns, because one keeps, because one has chosen not to entrust.
This reversal is fundamental. Until now, in modern tax history, declarations focused on flows, income, realized gains, and transfers. Never on the mere existence of an asset held outside the system, without intermediaries, without mandatory returns. Gold kept at home is not declared. Neither are jewelry, works of art, or cash. In the implicit law of free societies, there exists a boundary between taxation and the privacy of one's assets. This boundary is now being directly attacked, but only for one specific type of asset.
Why this one? Because it's digital. Because it's new. Because it embodies an ideological break more than a real budgetary issue. Cryptocurrency, and even more so Bitcoin, crystallizes a widespread fear among institutions: the fear of disintermediation, the fear of individual verification, the fear of a world where authority no longer stems from centralization but from protocol.
So, as always, we react to what is inconvenient. We frame things. We reclassify them. We assimilate them. A wallet becomes an account. A key becomes a financial asset. Private ownership becomes tax information. And we claim to have solved the problem, when all we have done is shift the issue.
Because this obligation is, in practice, unenforceable. The tax authorities cannot verify the existence of a self-hosted portfolio. They cannot check the declared value. They cannot audit the accuracy of the valuation. They cannot distinguish an honest error from a deliberate omission. Everything rests on self-declaration without a clear framework, without a standardized methodology, without any real capacity for control. It is not a data collection tool. It is an instrument of pressure.
But the most serious aspect isn't legal. It's human. Declaring a self-hosted portfolio isn't declaring abstract income. It isn't declaring a line item in a remote bank account. It's declaring the existence of directly accessible, transferable, and irreversible capital. It's declaring a potential source of constraint. It's making visible what, until now, was protected by the inherent opacity of direct ownership.
In an ideal world, this wouldn't be a problem. In a world where data was perfectly protected, where government agencies were impervious to leaks, where sensitive databases were never compromised, where information didn't circulate beyond its strictly legal use. But that world doesn't exist. It never has.
Data leaks have become the norm. Medical, tax, and judicial databases are regularly exposed, sold, and exploited. Each new centralization of sensitive information creates an additional attack surface. And here, the information is not innocuous. It is associated with a name, a value, and a time period. It implicitly designates a target.
Cryptocurrency-related kidnappings are no longer a theoretical hypothesis. They exist. They are increasing. They exploit precisely this asymmetry between administrative visibility and individual vulnerability. Making the declaration of self-hosted wallets mandatory means accepting the shift of risk from the system to individuals, to their families, to their physical privacy.
Faced with this, the institutional response is always the same: denial, contempt, accusations of paranoia. As if recent history had taught us nothing. As if violence were merely a statistical abstraction. As if the state's responsibility ended with the promulgation of the law, and not with its real consequences.
This text creates an impossible situation for those who have chosen prudence and responsibility. Those who have left centralized platforms. Those who have rejected ease in favor of control. Those who have understood that digital sovereignty cannot be delegated. It forces them to choose between administrative compliance and personal security, between formal legality and the concrete protection of their loved ones. This choice is not democratic progress. It is a subtle, insidious, technocratic violence that never dares to speak its name.
Above all, it reveals a profound misunderstanding of what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is not an asset to be monitored. It is not a market to be regulated like any other. It is a response to excessive control. A response to regulatory inflation. A response to a world where everything must be seen, tracked, archived, and justified.
The protocol itself asks for nothing. It collects no personal data. It requires no identification. It does not condition access on prior declaration. It operates in mathematical silence, indifferent to borders, national laws, or amendments voted on in committee. It advances, block by block, with a neutrality that deeply disturbs those whose power rests on the centralization of information.
This text will not put an end to self-hosting. It will not reduce fraud. It will not make the system fairer. It will produce something else. A leak. A fracture. Increased distrust. The most mobile capital will leave. The most cautious will remain silent. The most exposed will pay. And the State, trying to see everything, will end up understanding nothing.
Because there is a limit to surveillance before it becomes counterproductive. A limit to traceability before it erodes trust. A limit to the desire for control before it transforms responsible citizens into silent figures.
This text is a symptom. The symptom of a system that can no longer tolerate the existence of autonomous zones. That can no longer accept the idea that some can check without asking, possess without declaring, keep without reporting themselves.
Throughout history, lists have never been neutral. They always begin with a rational intention. They always end with stigmatization. Here, the list doesn't target criminals. It targets holders. Ordinary individuals who made a technical choice that, despite themselves, became a political act.
Bitcoin will survive this law. It will survive all laws of this kind. That's not the point. The point is what France chooses to sacrifice along the way: its capacity to accept individual responsibility, its tolerance for silent dissent, its understanding of what freedom truly means in the digital age. Because by trying to track everything, we end up erasing what matters most: trust, dignity, and the fundamental right to own property without being targeted.
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